


Grey VS Gray

by warlockdetective



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: "Did the editor know the Baudelaires?" even better question, "Who is the editor?" good question, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, POV Second Person, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-06-29 08:02:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15725301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warlockdetective/pseuds/warlockdetective
Summary: "Do the scary thing first, and get scared later." That's what they always said, wasn't it? Whoevertheywere.It's when you repeat that saying to yourself that you realize just how much you're shaking.





	Grey VS Gray

**Author's Note:**

> This is inspired by an AU a friend of mine came up with a while back where Lemony actually did die, but he was somehow brought back to life.  
> Honest feedback is appreciated.

It’s three in the morning, and you’re stuck in a web of your own thoughts.

Well, to tell the full truth, you’ve been stuck in your thoughts for a good while; the investigation you gave yourself what feels like ages ago has left you with more questions than answers. Every time you get part of an answer, another ten questions spring from thin air, and with everyone who had ever been involved with the Baudelaires being dead or off the grid, your chances of finding the lead needed to end the case once and for all were growing slimmer by the second.

Come the common mention of both a secret organization and one of its members…

…and then comes the mention of his death and the time and date of his funeral in an old obituary you found.

Then comes the reveal that faking one’s death was alarmingly common in this organization, along with a thought you never imagined having: What if this is who I’m looking for?

…but then comes the thought you couldn’t say you ever imagined having, though for reasons different than the first: What if he’s really dead?

 

It’s 3:15, and you’re walking down the street with a rucksack and a shovel, trying to look as casual as you can. Your rucksack holds two bottles of water, two sandwiches (though you wonder if you’ll be able eat them, considering what exactly you’ve been trying to convince yourself to do tonight), a wrench, a hammer, a rope ladder, a few small wooden posts, bolts of various shapes and sizes, and a book of matches.

It’s 3:18, and part of you is debating turning back. There’s..no way you should be doing this. What if someone catches you?

But then you think of some of the things you’ve learned about the organization in your research. You think of the abductions..of the smoke..of the murders…you think of how it was all said to be done in the name of good. The pit in your stomach grows deeper at the thought.

The thought that allowed you to press on with your mission was that what you were doing truly was in the name of good. You have to force yourself to keep moving when another thought enters your mind: Is it really?

 

It’s 3:55, you’ve already gone through both bottles of water with the walk alone, and you’re exactly where you’re meant to be: an old cemetery that, according to several sources, had scarcely seen visitors anymore considering that many of those buried there had passed a few centuries ago. The only piece of architecture nearby is an old hut that you assume was that of a grave keeper’s, the door completely absent. Once you set your shovel against the front of the hut, you cautiously head in.

Looking inside, at first you assume that the only thing inside is an old operating table, but then you see something that you’ve only seen in movies. The only things that prevent it from being functional are a couple of missing pieces (that, once you light a match to get a better look around, you’re surprised to find easier than you thought you would) and a lack of functioning bolts (unsurprisingly, age hadn’t exactly been kind to the machine).

You’re about to look at the bolts you brought with you when a loud **_crash_** startles you out of your thoughts, dropping both the rucksack and the match in your shock, most of the rucksack’s contents scattering across the floor of the hut. Frantically, you put out the match and look to the door, heart in your throat as you desperately try to think of something to say to the soul who found you..

…only to be greeted by the sight of heavy rain. _Shit._ You hadn’t even stopped to think about how the forecast would play into this. Not long after, the distinct sound of thunder rumbled across the cemetery, though the sight of lightning didn’t appear for another minute. You take this as a sign that, at least for now, you’re safe, but if want to get what you came here for done, you need to act fast. You open the rucksack and take out what you think you’ll need that didn’t fall to the floor; a few of the posts and the rope ladder — as much as they’d help, you know how useless the matches will be in the rain. Leaving the rest of the rucksack’s contents in the hut, you step out into the rain and grab your shovel.

 

It’s 4:10, and you find yourself standing in front of a tombstone with a downright cryptic epitaph engraved on it. From what you’ve gathered of your research, it’s the last few lines of a song that’s very well known throughout the organization. It takes you a bit to realize that the tombstone doesn’t have a name engraved in it. You think back to the obituary you discovered a while back, and as you give another glance to the grave, you realize that this is exactly what you came here looking for.

…but should you actually do this?

You take a quick look around; the rain is falling heavy enough for you to be missed at first glance, though the same could be said should anyone happen to be nearby. With what you’ve gathered about the organization, there’s a good chance that if you don’t find who you came here for, you’ll either find no one at all or someone else entirely. “Do the scary thing first, and get scared later.” That’s what they always said, wasn’t it? Whoever _they_ were.

It’s when you repeat that saying to yourself that you realize just how much you’re shaking. This could go wrong in more ways than you know you can think of, and you know full well that nothing you’re about to do is right. It’s 4:15, and you never thought you could feel this scared before.

But then you think about the investigation. You think about how close you are to finally getting the answers you need. You think about the fact that you haven’t even gotten to the scariest part of your plan. You think about what you found in the hut that stands a good couple of yards away from you, and you wonder just how far-fetched your plan actually is. You think about the fact that if you don’t act fast, the Sun will rise sooner than you know.

 

It’s 4:18, and after exhaling a breath you didn’t realize you were holding, you puncture the ground with your shovel and begin your six-foot long dig. The rain doesn’t exactly make this the easiest task in the world; the rain is making the ground (mud, at this point) harder to manage, and while you expected the dig to take a while (this isn’t something you would say you do on the regular), you have to admit that you’re somewhat overwhelmed by how greatly you underestimated this. Once you’ve gone a foot down, you finally think to set up your way back out, careful not to put the posts too close to the edge of where you’re digging.

It’s 4:55, and your shovel makes contact with something that isn’t mud. A flash of light above you shows you a glimpse of what looks like wood. It’s then that you realize two things: you found the coffin, and if that flash was lightning you need to get out of this predicament as quickly as you can. It’s 4:57 by the time you uncover the top half of the coffin; wood oak, from the look of it. It’s here that something else you hadn’t thought about enters your mind: How exactly are you going to get both yourself and the coffin out of the grave?

Another flash of lightning warns you just how quick you need to be moving right now. You take a quick glance at the coffin, and the pit in your stomach is so bad you’re surprised you can still move when you come to an unpleasant realization; if you want any chance of things working out, you’ll have take to take the body out of the coffin. Your hand falters on the lid.

You don’t want to do this.

You _really_ don’t want to do this.

…but you’ve already dug up the grave.

It’s 5:02, and you find yourself face-to-face with the one you came here for; barely any pictures of him existed, but from the vague descriptions given to the man by various sources, you knew this had to be him. You’ve read stories about how coffins help slow down decomposition, but even still you had expected his body to be a bit less..put together? You can’t find the words you want right now, and the lightning reminds you that you don’t have the time to try. You carefully lay his limp body over your shoulder and, after giving the ladder a firm tug to make sure it’s in place, begin your climb out.

 

It’s 5:15, and you find yourself back inside the hut, stumbling in the dark in search of the table you found earlier. The rain outside is far worse than it was when you got here, and with how aggressive the thunder and lightning both are now, you can’t help but think you had perfect timing. A sudden jab to the stomach almost makes you lose your grip on things until you realize that you’ve just walked into one of the table’s corners. Of all the ways you could’ve found it..

The body you’re carrying goes from being slung over your shoulder to being lain across the table as gently as possible. Heading back to your rucksack, you take out your matchbook and strike a match. You take the moment to get a closer look at the machine standing next to the operating table, and part of you wonders if you have what you need to get _whatever this is_ up and running again.

You look at the bolts that fell to the floor first; upon finding them to be either too small or too large, you go back to your rucksack. Whatever this is missing three bolts, each the same size but different shaped. How you figure out what you need to do is both a mystery and an outright miracle, and it’s when you see it spark to life just what this is: a machine to bring the dead back to life. The timing of the thunder and lightning makes you feel like you’re in one of those cheesy old horror movies, and you’d be amused by how surreal it all was if it wasn’t for the fact that you really did just dig up someone’s body.

You bring your attention from the machine to the body on the table next to it, and what you had considered to be the most far-fetched part of your plan earlier in the night comes back to you: Can you bring him back to life? Looking back to the machine, another set of questions enter your mind: Is this really the right person? What if this doesn’t work?

..oh no, you know next to nothing about anything related to old mechanics, _what if this doesn’t work?_

 

It’s 5:22, and you realize now that this is the scary thing. This is the point of no return. Part of you argues that the moment you carried his body out of the coffin and into the hut was the point of no return. Hell, the moment you began digging up his grave was the point of no return. But as you’re about to pull the once missing lever, you know for a fact that this is the part you can’t turn back from.

Your hand falters.

Get scared later.

You close your eyes and try to steady your breathing.

_Get scared later._

 

It’s 5:25, and you have to use all of your strength to pull the lever down. You know it’s just coincidental timing, but the lightning seems to crash louder and more frequently soon after you’ve done it. You can’t look at the body; you could’ve sworn you heard it thump against the table’s surface, though you don’t think it was on its own accord. You desperately try not to think about it as you pull the lever again.

It’s 5:28, and a sudden burst of fear runs down your spine when you swear you hear a raspy gasp for air. An unexpectedly firm grip on your wrist forces your eyes to open, and it takes everything in you not to scream at the sight that greets you: the body is fully animate now, and to say he didn’t look happy to see you would be an understatement. His grip on your wrist tightens as he hisses something you can’t quite decipher. Time had not been kind to the man’s vocal chords. You try to stutter a question, but your words are dead in the back of your throat.

“I’m not telling you where it is!” he repeats, “I’m _not_ telling you where _she_ is!”

Was that what he was saying before he died?

“W-where _who_ is, Mr. Snicket?” you manage to ask, your heart hammering loud enough to rival the thunder. He’s about to repeat himself again when his eyes widen suddenly. The grip on your wrist loosens somewhat as he starts to look around where he now finds himself. “Mr. Snicket,” you begin, “I’m—“

“Not who I thought you were,” he fills in. It’s not exactly what you expect him to say, but you can’t say it’s a false statement; if he was still living the moment of his death, he had been (for lack of a better word) jolted from the moment by a voice he didn’t recognize, and as far as you were aware he now found himself somewhere he had never been before. “Where..?” he tries to ask, only to stop himself and ask a different question: “What day is it?” It takes you a minute to remember the date; you have a bad habit of losing track of the days and you know it. You’re about to tell him the time when you see the look on his face, a mix of shock and horror.

 

It’s 5:35, and you never thought you’d see a reanimated corpse on the brink of tears, though you also can’t say you ever expected to bring someone back to life, so there’s that. “It’s been 18..” he doesn’t get the chance to finish his sentence, but you can assume that he’s talking about how long it’d been since his death. He turns to you, a frantic look in his eyes as he asks, “What’s happened? Is Beatrice—wait, do you even know her? Did they find—“

It’s 5:36, and it’s now that you realize that the man who you thought held the answers you were looking for is just as clueless about the case of the Baudelaire orphans as you are; he doesn’t even know that there’s a case at all. However, while he doesn’t have answers about the Baudelaires and their whereabouts now, he seems to hold the answers to questions relating to the past.

And so you tell him everything you know, from the Baudelaire fire to the burning of Hotel Denouement. You tell him about a taxi driver that offered to take them away from the hotel, and you tell him about what you heard was hidden somewhere in the taxi. You admit that you don’t know who was driving the taxi. You admit that you’re not sure if the Baudelaires are alive, and if they are you have no possible leads as to where they’d be.

 

It’s 5:40, and you can’t stop the tears from trailing down your cheeks when you admit that there’s a good chunk of the story you still don’t know. “I’m sorry I bothered you,” is all you can manage to choke out. Guilt washes over you in a way you can’t describe. You didn’t just bother him, you literally pulled him from the dead for nothing other than your own benefit. Why wasn’t he furious with you? Why wasn’t he saying you were as bad as some of the members of the organization? Why..?

A hand over your own pulls you out of your thoughts; not as jarring as when he thought you were..whoever he thought you were, but startling enough to fully get your attention. “I want to help you,” he tells you after a moment. You’re about to ask why until he continues, “I was working on an investigation of my own before..” He doesn’t get to the end of the sentence, but you know he doesn’t have to. “I have a feeling we’ll find the answers we’re looking for if we stick together.”

You find yourself inclined to ask what he was investigating, but you find yourself too stunned to ask the question. If you said that the last three hours you had experienced were full of events you expected to happen, you would be lying. Instead, you nod and begin to pick up what had fallen out of your rucksack earlier. It’s the only thing you can think to do to distract yourself from the fact that nothing about this situation feels real.

He attempts to stand up and join you, but it seems that while the upper half of his body is animate, the lower half isn’t quite there yet; his legs buckle, and he almost falls flat on the floor of the hut before your reflexes kick in, pulling yourself back onto your feet and catching him just in time. “Are you alright, Mr.—“ you begin to ask, but he waves you off before you can finish.

“Lemony works fine for me,” he insists. “I’m alright, it’s just..been a while since I’ve moved.” Once he steadies to a stand, you let him go.

 

It’s 5:50, and as you leave the hut with Lemony, you can’t help but wonder if you’ve done the right thing. You can’t help but think about the things you’ve heard VFD do in the name of good; not only were very few of the things they did actually good, the payoff for some of the things didn’t seem that satisfactory to you. Yet as the rain finally slows to a light drizzle, you think about how much closer the end of your investigation would come.

In the end, although the method used to find him was unorthodox, you found Lemony Snicket. Now all you had to do was hope that the payoff would feel rewarding enough to warrant how you found him.


End file.
